TeX Live 2003 miseries.

TeX Live 2003 miseries.

[John Culleton]

I installed the latest version of TeXLive 2003 (the so-called demo 
version) and did the fmtutil and texhash bit.  When I ran a job for a 
customer, texexec hung up at the point where a graphic was being 
loaded. So I went back to last year's texlive in a terrible hurry.  
That worked fine. 

Earlier, when TeXLive 2003 was still in beta they left out texexec 
altogether.  

Has anyone else tried Context using graphics on TeXLive 2003? I hate 
to report a bug to Tug if my experience is unique. OTOH if the iso 
image is defective in some way I do need to let someone know pronto.  

 

-- 
John Culleton
Able Typesetters and Indexers
http://wexfordpress.com

Re: TeX Live 2003 miseries.

[Hans Hagen]

At 22:59 13/10/2003, you wrote:
>I installed the latest version of TeXLive 2003 (the so-called demo
>version) and did the fmtutil and texhash bit.  When I ran a job for a
>customer, texexec hung up at the point where a graphic was being
>loaded. So I went back to last year's texlive in a terrible hurry.
>That worked fine.
>
>Earlier, when TeXLive 2003 was still in beta they left out texexec
>altogether.
>
>Has anyone else tried Context using graphics on TeXLive 2003? I hate
>to report a bug to Tug if my experience is unique. OTOH if the iso
>image is defective in some way I do need to let someone know pronto.

in the days before freezing tex live 8 quite some experiments were done (in 
know for instance that volker s installed the windows version each day a 
few t imes until it worked ok); as far as i can see things should work; on 
windows, it's irun.exe that is responsible for launching texexec (run irun 
--help to see the options)

Hans  

Re: TeX Live 2003 miseries.

[George N. White III]

On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, John Culleton wrote:

> I installed the latest version of TeXLive 2003 (the so-called demo
> version) and did the fmtutil and texhash bit.  When I ran a job for a
> customer, texexec hung up at the point where a graphic was being
> loaded. So I went back to last year's texlive in a terrible hurry.
> That worked fine.

What platform?  I tried to install various rc's on Win98 and ran into
numerous problems:

1.  the perl scripts were confused by the embedded spaces in the default
"c:\Program Files\.." install path.  In general, ConTeXt does not play
well for paths that have embedded spaces.

2.  the perl scripts search the PATH directories and supply a the full
pathname of programs (e.g., /texLive/bin/Win32/kpsewhich.exe) to perl's
backtick.  This failed when running texexec.exe in a command.com window,
Replaceing the "/" with "\" helps, but there were too many places to fix
in the time available, and meanwhile the disk on the system I was
borrowing died (due, I am quite sure, to overextertion caused by the
direct searching of the texmf trees for texexec.ini when kpsewhich failed
to run).

On Mandrake linux 9.0 and SGI Irix 6.5 TeXLive 2003 (full install) works
fine (using the current cont-tmf.zip which is a few days newer than the
version in TeXLive 2003).  The perl scripts have not changed.

> Earlier, when TeXLive 2003 was still in beta they left out texexec
> altogether.

On unix they just forgot to make some symlinks, the perl scripts were
there.  On Win32, I used Active State perl.exe to run the scripts.

> Has anyone else tried Context using graphics on TeXLive 2003? I hate
> to report a bug to Tug if my experience is unique. OTOH if the iso
> image is defective in some way I do need to let someone know pronto.

I'm not sure about the demo image.  If you are using Win32, does
texexec.exe find texexec.ini using kpsewhich?

-- 
George N. White III  <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>

Re: TeX Live 2003 miseries.

[John Culleton]

On Tuesday 14 October 2003 19:11, George N. White III wrote:
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, John Culleton wrote:
> > I installed the latest version of TeXLive 2003 (the so-called
> > demo version) and did the fmtutil and texhash bit.  When I ran a
> > job for a customer, texexec hung up at the point where a graphic
> > was being loaded. So I went back to last year's texlive in a
> > terrible hurry. That worked fine.
>
> What platform?  
Slackware 9.1
I reinstalled 2002 TeXlive to get my customer's job out the door. 
That worked. Then I downloaded the latest Context zip file. That 
didn't work for some reason. Fmtutil failed on pdftex and pdfetex. 
Then I reinstalled TeXLive 2003, the only change being that I did not 
first wipe out the web2c directory. Now TeXlive seems to work. As you 
may have noticed, the TeXlive installation program doesn't wipe out 
an existing web2c.  Just why retaining an old web2c directory helps 
things along I don't know. 
-- 
John Culleton
Able Typesetters and Indexers
http://wexfordpress.com

Re: TeX Live 2003 miseries.

[Hans Hagen]

At 00:53 16/10/2003, you wrote:
>On Tuesday 14 October 2003 19:11, George N. White III wrote:
> > On Mon, 13 Oct 2003, John Culleton wrote:
> > > I installed the latest version of TeXLive 2003 (the so-called
> > > demo version) and did the fmtutil and texhash bit.  When I ran a
> > > job for a customer, texexec hung up at the point where a graphic
> > > was being loaded. So I went back to last year's texlive in a
> > > terrible hurry. That worked fine.
> >
> > What platform?
>Slackware 9.1
>I reinstalled 2002 TeXlive to get my customer's job out the door.
>That worked. Then I downloaded the latest Context zip file. That
>didn't work for some reason. Fmtutil failed on pdftex and pdfetex.
>Then I reinstalled TeXLive 2003, the only change being that I did not
>first wipe out the web2c directory. Now TeXlive seems to work. As you
>may have noticed, the TeXlive installation program doesn't wipe out
>an existing web2c.  Just why retaining an old web2c directory helps
>things along I don't know.

Wipe out and set variables like the folowing (in a start up script), just 
to make sure that preinstalled tex's got lost:

TEXROOT=$1
export TEXROOT

TEXMFMAIN=$TEXROOT/texmf
TEXMFLOCAL=$TEXROOT/texmf-local
TEXMFFONTS=$TEXROOT/texmf-fonts
TEXMFPROJECT=$TEXROOT/texmf-project
TEXMFOS=$TEXROOT/texmf-linux
VARTEXMF=$TMP/texmf-var

export TEXMFMAIN
export TEXMFLOCAL
export TEXMFPROJECT
export TEXMFFONTS
export TEXMFOS
export VARTEXMF

PATH=$TEXMFOS/bin:$PATH
export PATH

HOMETEXMF=/nonexist
export HOMETEXMF

TEXMFCNF=$TEXROOT/texmf{-local,}/web2c
TEXMF='{$TEXMFOS,$TEXMFPROJECT,$TEXMFFONTS,$TEXMFLOCAL,!!$TEXMFMAIN}'
TEXFORMATS=$TEXMFOS/web2c
TEXPOOL=$TEXFORMATS
MPPOOL=$TEXFORMATS

export TEXMFCNF
export TEXMF
export TEXFORMATS
export TEXPOOL
export MPPOOL

TEXINPUTS=
MPINPUTS=
MFINPUTS=

export TEXINPUTS
export MPINPUTS
export MFINPUTS

Re: TeX Live 2003 miseries.

[Hans Hagen]

At 01:11 15/10/2003, you wrote:

>1.  the perl scripts were confused by the embedded spaces in the default
>"c:\Program Files\.." install path.  In general, ConTeXt does not play
>well for paths that have embedded spaces.

http://www.pragma-ade.com/context/mswintex (just runsetuptex,bat in the 
path where it is)
http://www.pragma-ade.com/context/linuxtex (run setuptex and generate formats)

is the minimum that you need for context. For windows the trick is in using 
irun in the right way, i.e. either use a full path spec or something 
relative like ../../whatever (which is what i've done there); i didn't test 
it for "program files"

Hans   

Re: TeX Live 2003 miseries.

[George N. White III]

On Thu, 16 Oct 2003, Hans Hagen wrote:

> At 01:11 15/10/2003, you wrote:
>
> >1.  the perl scripts were confused by the embedded spaces in the default
> >"c:\Program Files\.." install path.  In general, ConTeXt does not play
> >well for paths that have embedded spaces.
>
> http://www.pragma-ade.com/context/mswintex (just runsetuptex,bat in the
> path where it is)
> http://www.pragma-ade.com/context/linuxtex (run setuptex and generate formats)
>
> is the minimum that you need for context. For windows the trick is in using
> irun in the right way, i.e. either use a full path spec or something
> relative like ../../whatever (which is what i've done there); i didn't test
> it for "program files"

The other place where spaces cause problems is in the user's "HOME"
directory.  TeXLive looks in %HOME%/texmf, and texexec creates a
texfilename.tmp with a reference to %HOME%. On my brief foray into WinXP
the default HOME location had a space.  We are expecting a bunch of
Win9x users (currently with 4allTeX) to be converted to WinXP using
a departmental standard configuration, and I need a full TeX that will
play nicely with that (I did suggest that our users would be better
off running linux in vmware).

--
George N. White III  <aa056@chebucto.ns.ca>
  Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia, Canada